From: Michelle Starr
News Editor | UWIRE
www.uwire.com
I’m really sorry to send so many messages out in the last few days, but it’s the start of the semester and pretty crazy. UWIRE is trying to compile a list of weird classes and we’re hoping all of you can help out. Are there any new, interesting, strange classes this fall…Think “Harry Potter and British Comedy” or something like that. As always we’ll make it available to anyone who pitches in!
From the New York Daily News: A federal judge’s ruling that two FDNY entrance exams discriminated against minorities hasn’t persuaded the city to settle a controversial lawsuit. City lawyers are balking at a demand by the U.S. Justice Department and the Vulcan Society that black and Hispanic candidates who took the tests in 1999 and 2002 be given retroactive seniority. Read complete NYDN story here.
Love that headline of Mike Lupica’s New York Daily News column today, August 17. Such sentiment should have been echoed in the TV news broadcasts purporting to report on the town hall meetings when and where rabid vocalizers seemed more interested in trash talking than health care changes.
New America Media News Report, Anthony Advincula and Eunji Jang, Posted: Aug 04, 2009
Editor’s Note: Eunji Jang is a creative writing major and media studies major at Hunter College and a writer for the WORD.
NEW YORK — As the news spread about the release of two U.S. journalists from a North Korean prison, the biggest question for some Korean ethnic media is: How about the South Koreans the North has been holding as hostages for years?
Read full story here.
Message from Eunji Jang: “I wrote an article with Oni [NAM New York City Editor AKA Anthony Advinclua} a week ago, and Oni told me it was featured on yahoo. We had only 2 hours to write it and we wrote it with our blackberries!“
News media outlets are debuning right-wing claims that the House health care reform bill would encourage euthanasia of the elderly, including Sarah Palin’s claim, forwarded by the conservative media, that the bill would create a “death panel.”
Mailed August 14, 2009:
His Excellency Ayatollah Sayed ‘Ali Khamenei and
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
c/o H.E. Mr. Mohammad Khazaee
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN
622 Third Avenue, 34th Floor
New York, NY 10017
Fax: (212) 867-7086Your Excellencies,
August 12, 2009 10:07 am ET — 187 Comments
Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Lou Dobbs have used their radio and television shows to incite hatred and push wild conspiracy theories, leading several of Beck’s advertisers to reportedly pull out of his broadcasts. Many advertisers have nonetheless sponsored these hosts’ hate speech in recent weeks, including major corporations and organizations that, in 2006, reportedly requested that ABC Radio Networks not air their advertisements during any Air America programs.
Great August 14 show, very informative and providing great clarity with guests Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, about the slipshod news media presenting “unhelpful and misleading narratives that have not adequately informed the public about important issues.”
Shows how the news media’s lust for conflict in its images distorts and misleads and can negatively affect good public policy. See more here.
“From the mass arrests of journalists and reform advocates to the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations to the draconian restrictions on international and domestic media, it has been a harrowing summer for many of our colleagues in Iran—and an extremely discouraging one for all who support their right, and the right of all Iran’s citizens, to speak and write freely.
“PEN is working to win the release of all writers and journalists currently in prison in Iran, and to bring the voices of our Iranian colleagues before international audiences.”
NYPD has stopped and interrogated more innocent people during the first six months of 2009 than during any six-month period since it began collecting data on its troubling stop-and-frisk program: The overwhelming majority of whom were black and Latino. They did nothing wrong but … their names and home addresses are now stored in an NYPD database.
A federal judge has determined that the Fire Department of New York City used racially discriminatory hiring practices that unlawfully prevented hundreds of qualified African American and Latino applicants from joining the department. New York City has the least diverse fire department of any major city in the nation.
Shayana Kadidal, managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and Paul Washington, past president of the fraternal order of black firefighters, the Vulcan Society join Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales.
Earlier WORDblog post about victory.